Christmas Eve Wedding

‘No. Not like that. Like this.’ Swiftly he reached for her, his mouth starting to caress hers.

‘Oh, that kind of hi.’ Jaz managed to find the breath to tease him.

‘That kind of hi,’ Caid agreed, releasing her mouth to look into her eyes.

Jaz could feel the heat spreading through her body. She started to quiver, and then to tremble openly. She could see from the look in Caid’s eyes how much he was enjoying her helpless response to him.

Well, he would pay for that enjoyment later, when she tormented him the way he was tormenting her right now.

‘I’ve never met anyone who shows her feelings so clearly and so openly,’ Caid told her quietly. ‘I love that honesty about you, Jaz. I don’t have any time for people who cheat or lie.’

For a second he looked so formidable, so forbidding, that Jaz felt unsettled. To her he was the man she loved, but she could see that there was another side to him—a fiercely stubborn and unforgiving side, she suspected.

‘I love the way you show me your feelings,’ she heard Caid saying. ‘The way you show me how much you want and love me. Show me that now, Jaz.’

Jaz didn’t need a second invitation.

The heightened sound of Caid’s breathing accompanied the speedy removal of her clothes, until her progress was interrupted by Caid’s refusal to allow her to complete the task unaided, his hands hungrily tender against her body as they exchanged mutually passionate kisses and whispered words of love.

The heat of a New Orleans afternoon was surely made for lovers, Jaz reflected languorously a couple of hours later as she lay in Caid’s arms, enjoying the blissful aftermath of their lovemaking. After all, where better to escape the heat than in the shadowy air-conditioned coolness they were enjoying?

‘Time to get dressed,’ Caid murmured as he leaned over to kiss her.

‘Dressed? I thought we were going to talk,’ Jaz reminded him.

A sexy smile crooked his mouth.

‘We are!’ he confirmed. ‘Which is why we need to get dressed. If we stay here like this, talking isn’t going to be what I feel like doing,’ he added, in case Jaz had missed his point. ‘I can’t wait for us to be married, Jaz, or to take you home with me to Colorado—to the ranch. We can begin our lives together properly there. With your background, you’ll love it, I’ll get you your own horse, so that we can ride out together, and then, when the kids come along—’

‘Your ranch?’ Jaz stopped him in a shocked voice. ‘What ranch? What are you talking about, Caid? You’re a businessman—a financial consultant. The stores…’

‘I am a financial consultant,’ Caid agreed, starting to frown as he heard the note of shocked anxiety in Jaz’s voice. ‘But that’s what I do to make enough money to finance the ranch until it can finance itself. And as for the stores…to be involved in the stores or anything connected with them is the last way I would ever want to live my life. To me they epitomise everything I most dislike and despise.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘I could say that I have a hate-hate relationship with them. Personally, I can see nothing worthwhile in scouring the world for potential possessions for people who already have more than they need. That’s not what life should be about.’

Jaz couldn’t help herself—his angry words had resurrected too many painful memories for her.

‘But living on a ranch, chasing round after cattle all day, presumably is?’ she challenged him shakily.

With every word he had uttered Caid had knocked a larger and larger hole in her beliefs, her illusions about the kind of relationship and goals they shared. Jaz recognised in shocked bewilderment that Caid simply wasn’t the man she had believed him to be.

‘The stores aren’t just about…about selling things, Caid,’ she told him passionately. ‘They’re about opening people’s eyes…their senses…to beauty; they’re about…Surely you can understand what I’m trying to say?’ Jaz pleaded.

Caid narrowed his eyes as he heard the agitation and the anger in Jaz’s voice. From out of the past he could hear his mother’s voice echoing in his six-year-old ears.

‘No, Caid. I can’t stay. I have to go. Think about all those people I would be disappointing if I didn’t find them beautiful things to buy! Surely you can understand?’

No! I don’t understand! Caid had wanted to cry, but he had been too young to find the words he wanted to say, and already too proud, too aware of his male status, to let her see his pain.

But he certainly wasn’t going to make the mistake of holding back on telling Jaz how he felt.

‘I thought we were talking about us, Jaz! About our future—our lives together. So why in hell’s name are we talking about the stores?’

‘Because I work in one of them, and so far as I am concerned my work is a vitally important part of my life.’

‘How vitally important?’ Caid demanded ominously, his voice suddenly icily cold.

Jaz felt as though the ground that had seemed so safe and solid was suddenly threatening to give way beneath her, as though she was rushing headlong into danger. But it was a danger she had faced before, wasn’t it? Listening to Caid was in many ways just like listening to her parents—although Caid’s anger and bitterness was a frighteningly adult and dangerous version of parental emotion.

She felt intensely threatened by it—not in any physical sense, but in the sense that his attitude threatened her personal freedom to be herself.

As she looked at him, remembering the intimacy they had just shared, the love he had shown her, she was tempted to back down. But how could she and still be true to herself?

‘My work is as important to me as it gets,’ she told him determinedly. Though what she was saying was perhaps not strictly true. It was not so much her job that was important to her as the fact that it allowed her to express her creativity, and it was her creativity she would never compromise on or give up. ‘As important,’ she continued brittly, ‘as you probably consider yours to be to you!’

‘Nothing—no one on this earth—could ever make me give up the ranch!’ Caid told her emphatically.

‘And nothing—no one—could ever make me give up my…my…work,’ Jaz replied, equally intensely.

Silently they looked at one another. The hostility in Caid’s eyes made Jaz want to run to him and bury her head against his chest so that she wouldn’t have to see it.

‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ Caid’s voice was terse, his jaw tight with anger.

‘If I had known—’

‘You did know,’ Jaz interrupted him fiercely. ‘I have never made any secret of how much my…my creative my work means to me. If I had thought for one minute that you might not understand…that you were a…a farmer…there is no way that—’

‘That what? That you’d have jumped so eagerly into bed with me?’

‘I was brought up on a farm.’ Jaz struggled to explain. ‘I know that it isn’t the kind of life I can live.’

‘And I was brought up by a mother who thought more of her precious stores than she did of either my father or me. I know there is no way I want a woman—a wife—who shares that kind of obsession. I want a wife who will be there for my kids in a way that my mother never was for me. I want a wife who will put them and me first, who will—’

‘Give up her own life, her own dreams, her own personality simply because you say so?’ Jaz stormed furiously at him. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. Just what kind of man are you?’

‘The kind who was fool enough to think you were the right woman for him,’ Caid told her bitingly. ‘But obviously I was wrong.’

‘Obviously,’ Jaz agreed chokily, then emphasised, ‘Very obviously!’ And then added for good measure, ‘I hate farming. I loathe and detest everything about it. I would never ever commit myself or my children to…to a man as…as selfish and narrow-minded as you certainly are. My creativity is a special gift. It means—’

‘A special gift? More special than our love?’ Caid demanded savagely. ‘More special than the life we could have shared together? The children I would have given you?’

‘You don’t understand,’ Jaz protested, her voice thickening with tears as she forced herself not to be weakened by the emotional pressure he was placing her under. If she gave in to him now she would never stop giving in to him, and she would spend the rest of her life regretting her weakness. Not just for herself but for her children as well.

But still she tried one last attempt to make Caid see reason, telling him huskily, ‘When I was growing up I knew how important it was for me to fulfil the creative, artistic side of my nature, but my parents didn’t want to accept that I was different from them. If it hadn’t been for Uncle John I don’t know what would have happened. I had to fight far too hard for my right to be me, Caid, ever to be able to give it up for anyone…even you.’

What he hadn’t understood as a child Caid certainly understood now, he acknowledged bitterly. Once again, the most important person in his world was telling him that he wasn’t enough for her, that she didn’t love him enough to want to be with him for himself.

‘I thought after what I’d been through with my mother I’d be able to recognise another woman of her type a mile away,’ he growled angrily. ‘And perhaps I would have done too, if I hadn’t heard your precious Uncle John talking about you and saying that your family expected you to return to your roots and settle down to the life they’d raised you in.’

The accusation implicit in his words that somehow she had actively deceived him infuriated Jaz, severing the last fragile thread tugging on her heartstrings.